How To Best Use Facebook Ads As A Freelancer And Get Customers?

We all have heard the famous saying, “Time is money.” There is no lie that all of us spend plenty of our time on Facebook and feel guilty sometimes. Is there any way to get out of this guilt while not giving up on this hobby? Freelancing is the answer.

We are aware that Facebook is a powerful networking site as 2.8 billion people use it daily. A freelancer can use Facebook ads to enjoy the best of both worlds. In addition, there is no limitation about the domain you’re sticking to, as long as you know how to use the ads correctly. 

For example, if you’re a copywriter, you have to create an ad covering all your domain’s crucial points to stay ahead of the pack.

Facebook ads undoubtedly corner the freelancing market. Here is a quick guide to stepping up your freelancing game!

Find Your Advertising Goals

Fair and square, you cannot expect to post an ad and wait for unicorn clients to land on your freelance profile. You have to work strategically, for which first you need to find your advertising goals. For example, your goal as a copywriter (freelancer) is to boost your reach and enhance audience engagement. 

Here is a bag of tricks you should know to create optimized Facebook ads. Make sure that:

• Your Ad is targeted to the required audience (Quality over quantity)
• The ad is relevant to your audience (Relevance decides the ranking)
• It’s visually appealing (Enhance the chances of sharing)
• The copy and visual are perfectly aligned (To create a feeling of personalization)
• It includes an enticing value proposition (tell reasons that stand you out of the ordinary)
• It has a clear call to action (Create urgency through adding words like “save X% now” or “end soon,” etc.)

What Do You Need to Get Started with the Ads?

Now, you have made up your mind to augment your organic efforts by investing your time and hardly-earned money in creating Facebook ads. There is no room for oversight. Here are the tools and platforms you should know before jumping in.

1. FB Page 

As you’re running your ads on Facebook, you should begin with creating a Facebook page.

2. Landing Page 

This is the page where the audience will land by clicking your ads.

A landing page is a key to your success in convincing the audience to take action. The landing page must be relevant to the ads and provide what the audience wants!

3. Email Marketing Tool

Email Marketing tool is important to retain and engage with the qualified leads. Through email marketing, you can showcase your skills and services without getting charged with FB ads. The top email marketing tools include the following.

• ActiveCampaign
• DirectIQ Email Marketing
• Sleeknote
• HubSpot Marketing Hub

If you are looking to add a Facebook pixel to your Shopify site, click here.

Target Audiences

There are 4 types of FB audiences:

1. FB Saved Audience 

FB saved audience involves targeting audience based on interests, behavior, and demographics, i.e., age, location, gender, and language. For this kind of audience, FB offers you the option to save your time for any future campaign through storing your commonly used target setting. Utilizing this option, you don’t have to select the same option multiple times. 

2. Facebook Custom Audience

This kind of target audience is effective yet difficult to catch. It involves the audience that has shown some interest in your services in the past. Targeting this kind of audience depends on how keen you’re at keeping records. In this matter, “Facebook tracking pixels” might help you observe audience behavior.

3. Facebook Lookalike Audience

You select your Lookalike audience based on people in your custom audience list, people who liked your FB page, and retargeting pixel. Once you have selected your lookalike audience percentage, this option helps you expand your reach to the relevant audience.

4. Facebook Special Ad Audience

You can create Special Ad Audience to reach new people when your campaign is about Credit, Employment or Housing ( Special Category). It seems like a lookalike option, but it more precisely and specifically targets the audience with similar interests and behaviors. You can also decide the location and size of the required target audience.

Remarketing

Remarketing is just another name of retargeting. It is a popular form of digital marketing that any freelancer can use to serve ads to the audience who has visited their page once. Facebook ads are one of the best ways for remarketing.

It simply involves tagging a code to the visitors to track them and remind them of your services.

Remarketing offers you a second chance to convert the audience, and who’d not want to give it a whirl?

Guide to Set up Remarketing:

Let’s consider a scenario where you’re a copywriter. You’ve invested your budget in attracting the required audience. You see people watching your ads, but they bounce back instead of engaging. Exactly where remarketing can help you catch those viewers’ attention back.

Here’s how one can set up remarketing by following these quick step-by-step instructions.

1. First of all, log in to your Fb ad manager.
2. In the next step, you will need to select the audiences from tools.

3. Now select create a custom audience.

4. Next, select the type of audience you want to create from a custom list, app activity, and website traffic.

Customer List

You can target the customer list either through uploading a file or just by copying and pasting the targeting emails, phone numbers, and FB user ID’s

Website Traffic

If you don’t have a custom audience pixel already, you must install Facebook pixel to target website traffic. For this: 

• Go back to the tools bar
• Select pixels
• Select “create a pixel”
• Name and create your pixel
• Now go back to the ‘create custom audience” and pick the option “website traffic”

Retarget Your List of Contacts

The best possible way of retargeting is the custom list.

What is a Custom List?

The custom list serves as an identifier. It is based on the audience that has shown an interaction with your page in the past. It is made to remind the audience about the services they visited at least once. 

It includes the information (phone number, email, FB page user ID, Facebook app user ID, etc.) related to the target customer. Facebook hashes this information so you can use it in the future to show ads to your target audience included in the custom list.

Benefits of Using a Custom List

Here are some top benefits of using a custom list:

• Custom list maximizes the chances of response and engagement by the audience
• It offers to retarget the non-converted audience
• It helps to generate leads
• It also helps to lower your per acquisition cost

How to Create a Custom Audience from a Customer List?

If you’re ready to retarget your custom audience through using customer lists. Here are the steps.

1. Select the option “customer list” while “creating custom audience.”

2. Now pick from 3 different types of available custom lists options.

3. Add key customer data identifier (Email, phone no, gender, date of birth, age, FB id, etc.) while directly uploading the list.

Pro-Tip 

Create the highest value customer lists to retarget and create lower value customer lists to improve your methods to improve your selling skills.

Interest-Based Targeting

Interest-based targeting involves increasing the ad’s relevance by targeting FB users based on their assumed interests.

Picture This!

You’re on the mission of showcasing your copywriting skills and end up choosing an audience interested in beauty cosmetics, dress designing, or astronomy. No matter how effective your ad is, it would get you no results.

Benefits of Interest-Based Targeting:

• Save money – It is crucial for small advertisers as they don’t have enough money to spend on irrelevant causes.
• Increase conversion – It is an effective way to get most conversions
• Save time – It’s worth every second you spend snooping around for keywords based on interest.

Pro-Tip

Don’t overlook the fact that any customer who has engaged with your competitor might love to engage with your ad in the future, as well.

How to Set Your Interest-Based Targeting?

If you want to continue with interest-based targeting, remember Facebook offers 2 options to target an interest-based audience.  

1. Browsable Interests

You can funnel your target audience from the list of browsable interests to increase the specificity. For example, as a copywriter, you’ll choose the category “technology” from the browsable list. 

2. Searchable Interests

Facebook also offers the option to dive deep. This category requires selecting subcategories in the browsable interest section. For this, you’ve to enter an interest to the left of the “Browse” button.

Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is a valuable service that you promote to your audience in return for an opt-in email address. 

As a famous quote says, “Content is the king, target audience is the queen, and undoubtedly the queen rules the house.”

To collect names, phone numbers, and emails, lead magnet provides you with a ladder to create marketing emails that boost sales. 

Benefits of Setting Up Lead Magnet

Now, you must be wondering why do we actually need the lead magnet.

The answer lies in why you started to create an ad in the first place. Yes, “high-intent customer” is the reason. With a huge list of competitors available, it is difficult to grab the attention of your target audience. 

And once you reach your prospective customer, holding their attention is even more difficult. That’s where a lead magnet can ease your task.

 “It is like a complimentary service that you offer to the customer in order to get their contact information.”

For example, as a copywriter, you can offer 30% off for their 1st service if they sign in as a newsletter.

Now that’s appealing to get the ball rolling.

Best Practices 

As you have understood, the lead magnet is one of the best marketing strategies. Let’s move on to the ways to set it up.

To generate the best lead magnet, you should focus on the following points.

• Provide value to the customer
• Offer instant gratification
• Be easy to consume
• Position your brand as the expert

Lead Magnet Ideas

Here are some tried and true ideas that help generate lead magnet perfect from beginning to end.

1. Email Course

An email course is a quick way to attract audience attention as it offers a brief version of your course to the target audience by email. 

The next question in your mind must be, “why to set up an email course?” 

The reason is it serves as an autoresponder and tailor and sends email series over a long period. 

Alec Beglarian, a famous digital marketer and the man behind Email Mastery, has created a 7-days free email course for turning beginners into email marketing experts.

Pros	Cons
Tested strategy Build up a list of leads Boost awareness Create trust	Email courses are outdated  They are risky choices to compel the audience

2. Free Webinars 

Webinars are the best choice to position yourself as an expert.

Webinars include highly qualified information for your prospect audience, wrapped up in pre-recorded or live videos.

A great example of a freelancer and online marketing educator, Amy Porterfield, who is using her webinar marketing campaign as a lead magnet.  

Pros	Cons
It offers an incredible conversion rate Expand your scope of communication	Takes too much time

3. Free Resource PDFs, Checklists, Whitepapers 

With Whitepapers providing a deep dive into a complex topic, Checklists involving the main services and free resource PDFs are some of the best options to catch your audience’s attention.

Here, we will take the example of Yaro Starak, who is a freelance blogger and uses eBooks/PDFs as a lead magnet to promote his coaching program.

Pros	Cons
They are super easy and quick lead magnet ideas	You have to be vigilant about minute details from templates to design

4. Video Series 

Video series offers one of the best formats for lead magnets. It doesn’t require too much investment. You can show up anything that the audience craves to know in 5 minutes, and that works!!

Take a look at how David Siteman Garland is using video tutorials as a lead magnet. He is a US-based freelance author, who offers video tutorials in exchange for just your email. 

 

Pros	Cons
An irresistible incentive Stimulate the brain’s emotional center	Requires a lot of research

Landing Pages

Structure of a Good Landing Page 

A good landing page has a catchy heading that grabs the visitor’s attention, is short and relevant, focuses on converting the visitor, and includes a signup button to your most wanted response, HAS NO DISTRACTING LINKS.

Copy and Content of the Landing Page

The landing page content must not exceed a single page. It should include a unique selling proposition. Most importantly, you should ensure that the content offers enough motivation to persuade visitors to take the required action.

Social Proof

Social proofs are the ultimate source to push the audience to take action. As a copywriter, you can use different social proof ideas that involve adding the number of trusted clients, client reviews, successful orders, etc. 

Call to Action

A compelling call to action increases the likelihood of the target audience engagement. Here is a bag of tricks to generate an effective call to action:

• Use contrasting color
• Offer a bonus
• Use simple words
• Aggravate the problem
• Evoke curiosity

Tools for Creating a Landing Page

Here are the best tools for creating a landing page that can save your precious hours:

• Leadpages
• Unbounce
• Instapage
• Lander

Examples

For your better understanding, here are some examples of the great landing pages that freelancers use:

Creating your Ad in Facebook Ad Manager

Now, coming up next is a step-to-step guide for creating your ad in FB ad manager.

• Click the option “create” from the campaign tabs.
• Select the campaign objective “conversion” and then “continue.”
• Fill in the “campaign name.”
• Set “campaign budget optimization.”
• Set “start and end dates for campaign.”
• Select your audience by FB audience targeting options, and save it.
• As a beginner, select the “automatic” placement option.
• Select the delivery option
• Upload media files
• Select language
• Preview the ad

By following these quick steps, you can connect with your target audience, lead them to your landing page, and ultimately convert them within no time.

Budget for Your FB Ad

If you’re confused about how to analyze your budget and campaign performance. Here’s a quick guide to find your perfect FB ad budget:

• Consider your goal
• Understand how much it might cost by keeping your ears to the ground
• Start small and track your metrics
• Ramp up ad spending

Basic Concepts

Here are some concepts you should be familiar with in respect to Facebook advertising costs. 

1. Cost per click 

The cost per click of your campaign is the money required per click. In US, the average cost per click is $0.28, while globally, it rises as much as $0.35. The cost per click varies from industry to industry.

2. Cost per lead

It decides the cost-effectivity of your campaign as it involves the advertiser’s paying money for each signup from prospective customers. 

3. Cost per qualified lead

To calculate the cost per lead, divide the total cost of the campaign by the number of leads generated to calculate the cost per qualified lead.

In Conclusion

Undoubtedly FB ads are a powerful way to step up your freelance business. But remember, there are many competitors out there seeking the same purpose. If you want to march past them and want to get noticed for your exceptional values, you’ve to learn to “Think like your customer and provide them quality and high value.” It’d assist you in displaying your skills with pride!

Did you find this blog helpful for your business? Want more weekly insights to help grow your small business faster? Sign up below for our upcoming newsletter for free packed with curated tips and strategies to generate additional income!